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Pdf

This may be a stupid question but....
what's so attractive about adobe acrobat/.pdf type files for certain documents?
Is it because it makes pretty documents that work across OSs?
Thanks for any replies

Pretty much. You guessed it. Plus they are supposedly smaller than other document formats.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
- Samuel Johnson

their portable (portable document format = pdf...)
if you've ever done a layout of something with fonts, table, photos on your box and then sent it to someone else..it can be a complete mess...fonts have to be exactly the same on both machines....that is if they can even open it...i can send you a pagemaker 6.5 file...or a pdf file...
pagemaker costs about 700bucks...reader is free...what you want to read it with...

you can get huge compression ratios...i just sent a file to a client which was almost 40 megs prior to pdf-ing...the pdf was 1.2meg

it's one of the only secure* form of document transfer...our corp policy doesn't allow any attachements but pdf...they can't contain executables...

*there was one very low risk vulnerability found about 6 months ago...doesn't mean there won't be more...but compared it to a doc of xls file...its as safe a it gets...

theres more...but adobe'd have to pay me...

I used to be With IT. But then they changed what IT was. Now what I'm with isn't IT, and what's IT seems scary and weird." - Abe Simpson